Die Verteidigerin - Der Fall Nicola (2026)

Freiburg lawyer Lou Caspari is asked by her friend, teacher Benno Schmidtberger, to help search for his missing wife, Nicola. The project manager usually sets out for a morning walk in the woods with her dog, Anton, and then drives on to her sister-in-law Sabine’s business. When Nicola fails to arrive there, Benno reports her missing to the police. But the slow handling of the case by senior detective commissioner Kröber is a great emotional burden for Benno and his teenage daughter, Jasmin. Lou puts pressure on Kröber and begins investigating on her own. When a tip leads to Nicola’s abandoned car, its windows smashed, at the forest lake, the signs of a crime grow stronger. The police search efforts, including a mantrailing operation in the woods, come to nothing. Surveillance-camera footage proves that Nicola met with her former husband and Jasmin’s biological father, Stefan Buchholz, on the day she disappeared, but questioning him yields no further information. In desperation, Jasmin and her friend Selma appeal to the public with a missing-person notice on social media, giving Nicola’s full name. Most of the tips they receive, however, prove unreliable. Intrusive comments from true-crime influencers and other amateur sleuths, along with growing media attention, further unsettle the family. In addition to these outside pressures, emerging personal conflicts increasingly fray their nerves. In an effort to regain control of the coverage, Benno and Jasmin reluctantly decide to make a statement to the press. But Benno suddenly comes under suspicion himself after a long-ago Hooligan story is found online, and the juvenile sentence imposed at the time for assault gives rise to speculation about the true nature of his relationship with Nicola. In a conversation with Lou, he convincingly insists that he is innocent. Meanwhile, impatient Jasmin follows a false lead that eventually takes her to an uninvolved asbestos-disposal company. While fleeing from suspicious pursuers, she is hit by a car and taken to hospital with injuries. Remorseful, Selma, who initially kept quiet for fear of negative reactions, now explains how the car was damaged: a classmate smashed its windows out of anger over Benno’s poor grades. In Lou’s presence, Jasmin remembers a package that had recently arrived. Nicola had ordered a dog collar with a built-in transmitter so she could locate her dog if it wandered off. With the help of the second receiver, Lou tracks down Günther Haslinger, who has a prior conviction and had been cutting firewood in the woods and taken the collar. He recounts what really happened: after Anton chased a wild animal, Haslinger drove Nicola in his car to a spot several kilometres away. There she climbed up a slope and suffered a fatal accident at a cliff. Lou finds her body at the edge, while the dog remains unharmed at the cliff’s edge. Nicola’s conversation with Stefan had been only about the possibility of Benno adopting her daughter.